In My Wildest Dreams (9 page)

I did, however, have the revolver. This was an unequalled possession. A genuine Colt service revolver 'as used in the battle of Madagascar', according to my elder brother Lin, who came home after taking part in that skirmish against the Vichy French. I had made a wooden gun and Lin's baby son, Graham, had cried so much to have it that Lin offered to make an exchange – the real weapon for my wooden fake.

'Say he goes and shoots somebody?' my mother said anxiously after my undelayed acceptance. And an unusual understatement: 'He could get into trouble.'

There was no ammunition with the weapon and my brother had removed one or two essential parts. Nevertheless, it was a
real
gun. I would stride through the streets of Moscow with the huge revolver stuck in my snake belt and Chubber ranging alongside with his scout knife and Diana air rifle. A formidable pair.

We had a secret sign, leaving messages in niches known only to us, signed off with a drawing of a dagger dripping blood. One day Chubber was taken to hospital where he nearly died of peritonitis. My mother was also ill and I cried in bed at night. After several weeks Chubber had recovered enough to send me a letter – signed with a shaky, dripping dagger. I knew then he would be all right. Forty years later, opening a letter I saw again the sign of the blooded dagger. I had forgotten it.

There were sporadic outbreaks of fighting at the Sunday school where Roy and I were sent by our mother while she went to bed with a cup of tea and the
People.
We each had a penny for the collection plate which we spent on sweets. When sweets vanished in the war they were curiously replaced by carrots and we spent our collection money on them instead. I still have perfect teeth.

There were agitators at Sunday school who caused trouble, and one afternoon I was leaving the corrugated iron church clutching my Bible text card when I was set upon by a jealous rival. I fought with my bony fists and elbows and we ended up in a pool of mud. An angular Sunday school teacher rescued me and my text and insisted on accompanying me home. I could not understand why she did this. My assailant had vanished, vanquished, and my clothes were only wet and muddy. I could have done all the necessary explaining myself. She probably had an urge to take the gospel into someone's home and she chose mine. I was annoyed when she insisted on coming with me and I strode off on the wet Sunday pavements, with the zealous lady lagging behind. Indoors my mother was fluttering the pages of the
People
With gentle snores. I waited, half-hiding, hoping the Sunday school lady had changed her mind.

She had not. She puffed to the front door and knocked evangelically. My befuddled mother was brought down to face a prolonged monologue. It was not all religious for the visitor's ploy was to obtain conversion by conversation, by discussing the children, perhaps, or the victim's hobbies.

My mother's hobby, apart from going to bed with the
People
on Sunday afternoons, was knitting and eventually, to get rid of the garrulous woman, my mother promised to knit some clothes for the Sunday school nativity play.

We had ample wool because my father when returning from a voyage would bring home sweaters, scarves, gloves, balaclava helmets and suchlike, knitted by patriotic ladies and sent to the armed forces and the Merchant Navy. The garments were in service colours; air force blue, navy blue and khaki. Roy and I would go to school on sharp mornings wrapped up like whalers. We could wear a different colour balaclava each day. The sweaters were huge but Mum swiftly unravelled the wool and made something else. She even knitted us woollen drawers to wear under our short trousers, but these itched and, since it was the debagging season, the risk of being found with our loins encased in RAF blue was too great. We stopped wearing them.

As promised, my mother set about making the costumes for the nativity play; a cloak for the Virgin Mary, a coat for Joseph and some swaddling clothes for the baby in the manger. It was undoubtedly one of the few occasions when the infant Jesus has been seen wearing khaki.

War at once brought to Maesglas a great deal more excitement and novelty than to most places in Britain. Elsewhere in the country, very little actually happened in the early days and there was relief as well as disappointment. But for us it was different. What appeared to be most of the British army tramped and trundled down our street on its way to France to face the foe.

Tredegar Park, a mile away, had overnight become an enthralling place of camouflaged tents, drilling soldiers, horses and vehicles which swerved in clouds of summer dust. Sentries with long bayonets and uncertain expressions were posted at the familiar iron gates. What had been our commonplace playground was transformed into a fortress. The swings and the see-saw were cordoned off. Nothing so thrilling had happened in the park since Kenny Griffiths, a thin boy from Maesglas Avenue, got his head scrunched under the moving roundabout and had to be rushed to the Royal Gwent Hospital to have it straightened. Now all the local children went to the railings, their faces pressed between the bars in zoo-like attitudes, witnessing the might of the British Expeditionary Force assemble and flex its muscles.

There was much lining up, and orders echoed over the tents. We saw a private soldier arrested for letting a couple of girls go into the park and having a lark with them on the playground swings. A fearsome sergeant-major in a flat hat arrived and bawled at the man who was led, head hanging, away. My brother said he had heard he was later shot.

Every day and on many nights the soldiers marched and their vehicles rumbled down Maesglas Avenue on their way to Newport Docks and the troopships. Thousands of men clumped past our house, some blatantly singing, some with bands, some with heads set straight ahead. When the first rank of the day was spotted at the end of the street, we and our neighbours would leave our houses. People used to throw cigarettes and fruit and sweets to the soldiers who caught them on the march, or sometimes in the face. One young private was injured by an apple which hit him in the eye. He had to sit on the pavement outside our front garden for quite a time before continuing on his journey to the war. Sometimes my mother would stand at our gate and sing with the passing soldiers. Although the doomed prophecy of 'We're going to hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line' was popular, they also sang songs from the campaigns of another generation. My mother liked 'Goodbye Dolly I must leave you' because her name was Dolly. Army lorries and platoon trucks and ominous ambulances rolled up the little street, and, most thrillingly, small tanks, Bren-gun carriers and armoured cars. In the middle of the night I would wake and rush to the window when I heard them coming. They passed in the darkness like metal ghosts. There were also horses pulling field guns. After thousands of years the horse was at last being excused man's battles and there were now only a few which my mother said was as it should be. My father, perhaps recalling his profitable deal with the French farmer, one war ago, was of the opinion that they would never be satisfactorily replaced. 'In an emergency,' he said, 'you could always eat your horse. You can't eat a tank.'

We had a family interest in the army's embarkation, for my Uncle Bert was a regular soldier and was in camp in the park, waiting to go to France. He was the husband of the only sister to whom my mother ever spoke, Auntie Iris who lived in Maesglas Crescent. She was younger and they had kept in contact when mother had abandoned, or been abandoned by, the rest of her family. (In writing this, I have just recalled that when I went into Barnardo's I 'gave' my aunt to another inmate, a boy called Stephenson who had no relations. He was very pleased to get letters from her, although she must have been somewhat puzzled because she had intended to write to me. My attitude also seemed rather lofty in the circumstances.)

Although Sergeant Bert Lucas had been in the Royal Engineers since the First World War, his wife was wracked with anxiety. I had orders to watch out for him passing by and, if possible, get a message to Iris, two streets away, so she could run and kiss him on the march. The tender moment, however, was not to be. He suddenly appeared, mixed in with hundreds of others, and was abreast of our house before we realised. My mother got to the gate and Bert broke ranks and scampered over to give her a kiss. I ran like mad, beating my imaginary horse along the pavements, alongside the troops, but by the time I reached Iris's house it was too late. The formation had tramped on.

Uncle Bert served through the early months in France but was then injured when he fell from his bicycle after a shell had landed in the vicinity. He was sent home and invalided out of the service. He went to work in the port where he fell into the empty dry dock and was killed.

Between the moving regiments, on a Sunday, came a kilted pipe band, with drums and busby hats, and a leader who tossed a silver mace. They were nothing to do with the military but were regular visitors. 'It's the Scotchilanders!' the children would shout and rush out into the road to watch them and perhaps put a penny in the proferred hat. Then, amazingly, we read in the
South Wales Argus
that they had been arrested as suspected IRA men. My mother said she had guessed all the time. 'Did you notice,' she said, her eyes narrowing, 'how that one in the front, the one with the stick, used to look down the side of our house every time they passed? Spying out the engine sheds, see. Planning to blow them up I expect.'

We had other familiar itinerants. Nocka, the ice cream man, whose full name was Nockavelh. He was Italian, we all thought, until Italy entered the war against us. Harmless Neopolitan cafes had their windows smashed in Newport and frightened Italian people were rounded up by the police. Nocka appeared as usual on the Sunday in his curly-painted van with the words 'Maltese Nationality. Loyal British Subject' large upon its sides.

There was also a man who sold greengrocery from a cart drawn by a dozy horse. The man was very lively and popular and when Pill, where he lived, was bombed, the story came back that he had been killed. An immediate collection was made around the houses and the money dispatched to his widow. Then, it transpired, that there had been some misinformation. It was his
horse
who was blown up. The man was all right. He kept the money, though, and said it was to help him buy another horse.

Although the dock area was thoroughly bombed the remainder of Newport escaped comparatively lightly from the German air raids of 1940 and '41. My mother – who had been to Birmingham on a mysterious visit – graphically described the terrible scenes there and said they were pumping lime down into the debris because some of the corpses would never be brought up. She had been to Birmingham once or twice before the war on anonymous visits and on one occasion an unexplained lady, about the age of my elder brothers, appeared to stay with us for a few days. We called her Auntie Daisy. I often wondered who she was.

One night the Germans dropped some landmines on Newport. They drifted down lightly on parachutes and then exploded resoundingly. Hally, my second brother, was home from sea, where, God knows, it was dangerous enough, but the air raids unnerved him. Roy and I lay on the air raid shelter bunks, peering over the edges with wonder, while our elder brother lay flat on the floor with his hands clamped over the back of his head, which, he explained breathlessly between detonations, was the prescribed way to lie while under attack. This was an attractive novelty and we were eager to try it. There was, however, only room on the floor for him, and he told us to get back in our bunks. I don't know where my mother was on this occasion, possibly making a cup of tea, or doing her make-up so she would look decent in death. She was particular about such things.

Hally, in fairness, had been under weeks of stress at sea. He had been bombed and torpedoed and was then discharged as unfit and told to get a civilian job ashore. So, in the midst of a war that was growing more violent and threatening by the day, he found himself as a door-to-door salesman of Kleen-e-zee brushes.

He used to bring home samples, brushes of every use and size; brushes for cleaning shoes and sinks, for brushing your hair or your clothes; thin, flat, wide and fat; some hard as a bed of nails, some soft as our cat. We had more brushes for things than anyone in Newport. He became embarrassed by this peaceful occupation, and, in the end, he just disappeared, vanished, true to the family tradition. No more was heard until the postman brought an inauspicious parcel containing his clothes. There was no note, no explanation whatever. My mother thought he was dead and somebody had kindly sent his trousers home. Eventually Hally himself arrived in Royal Air Force uniform. That, as far as I recall, did not last long either. Knowing he was an experienced sailor they put him on a rescue launch used to pick up ditched airmen from the sea. The first time he went out on a mission a loitering enemy fighter machine-gunned the boat. After that he went to live in Birmingham.

One night German planes over Newport scattered a pointless white powder. At dawn it looked as if there had been an out-of-season snow-storm. The authorities were convinced initially that it was a poison gas attack and everyone had to wear their gasmasks. Then a van with a loudspeaker came up the street giving orders that housewives had to scrub down the pavement outside their houses. It was a curious sight, my mother and all her neighbours right to the far end of Maesglas Avenue, swishing with water and brushing brooms. They made jokes and laughed about it, especially when one simple woman came out to do the job still wearing her gasmask.

Then there was a tragedy that touched many of us. At the top of Dock Street was a stamp dealer's shop owned by a family called Phillips. We went there with our pennies and twopences to buy British Colonials or the new issues of Free France and Free Holland or stamps with President Roosevelt or Hitler on the front. One night a German bomber, disabled by anti-aircraft fire and losing height, fouled the wire of a barrage balloon and fell to the ground. It landed on top of the house where the Phillips family lived on a hill and set fire to it. The husband and wife escaped by the traditional method of climbing down from their bedroom on a sheet. The young son went back into the blazing building to find his sister and both died. A rumour went around that the garden was littered with foreign stamps and there was a rush of boys to see if it was true. All that could be seen was the blackened shell of the house and the pathetic sheet hanging from the window.